The Cure Essentials

Few artists have captured the beauty of despair as masterfully as Robert Smith and The Cure. Shifting from bleak introspection to radiant pop bliss, the band’s music is as diverse as it is foundational. If all you knew were songs like “Friday I’m in Love”, you might never guess their origins as post-punk experimenters, beginning with their 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys. From there The Cure would redefine goth rock with a trilogy of increasingly claustrophobic albums—Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography—recorded between 1980 and 1982. 1985’s The Head on the Door found The Cure embracing pop on their own terms, blending gloomy psychedelia with jangling acoustics, delivering hits such as “In Between Days” and “Close to Me” while giving definition to the burgeoning alternative rock genre. By 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and “Just Like Heaven”, they sounded genuinely, deliriously happy, yet angst still simmered beneath their euphoric melodies. The tension between light and dark peaked with their 1989 masterpiece, Disintegration. The highs (“Lovesong”) had never sounded more unburdened, nor the lows (“The Same Deep Water as You”) more hopeless. Their wide-screen sound filled stadiums; it also influenced a generation of emo bands intent upon fusing visceral sonic power with fathomless psychological depth.